I would absolutely love to drop this subject, but incase there was some
misunderstanding I would not like to advance a pogrom against believers.
My email suggested that we question our own beliefs, and engage with
some sort of intellectual restlessness. It was this sense of experiment
that allowed Pound to broaden the rang of spiritual figures with which
to populate the Cantos. One can return reapraise the divine after one
has taken a solid course in uncertainty. The web site below seemed to me
to be nothing if not naive.
On Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 06:07 PM, charles moyer wrote:
> James, Dan and all,
> I think you may want to reassess your opinion of atheists if you
> take
> some time to examine this site:
>
> http://www.positiveatheism.org/index.shtml
>
> But see if you can find among these atheists any who would wish to
> support
> a pogrom against the "believers", an argument no doubt but more often
> than
> not a defensive one. But I think you may be surprised to see in whose
> company you will find yourself.
> And Dan, I think Hitler was a Roman Catholic, granted not a very
> good
> one, but it was the Catholic party's vote which put him and the Nazis in
> power in the Reichstag in 1933.
> How much rarer and precious does it make that 1%?
>
> Charles
>
> ----------
>> From: Stoner James <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Take atheism for granted.
>> Date: Thu, Mar 21, 2002, 11:29 AM
>>
>
>> Dan:
>>
>> You said: Doesn't it frighten you that about 99% of this planet's
>> denizens are (generally) mindless adherents of one formal religious
>> sect
>> or another?
>>
>> I'm not certain why such a thing should frighten me (us.) As an
>> atheist, you are also closed off to the possibility of a theistic
>> alternative. As an agnostic, it is both closed mindedness and
>> intolerance that I most fear. Atheist, Muslim, Jew, Christian -- its
>> those among them that are closed minded and intolerant (more
>> appropriately referred to as fundamentalist) that scare me. They scare
>> me because they want to make everyone else like them. The long for the
>> nostalgic notion of their own grand narrative being imposed and coerced
>> upon others. Thank God (oops) the atheists haven't organized, but
>> there are the fundamentalists among them; they would annialate theists
>> if they had the chance.
>>
>> Most of us ARE mindless adherents to something or another. Because we
>> use language, and it is taken so much for granted, it makes it
>> necessarily so.
>>
>> $.02
>>
>> __________________________________________________
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>
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